Logic Pro better than . . .?

[MarkOne]

The thing that has always put me off Reaper is the price of all the additional plus-in instruments I'd need to achieve what I do with the ones that come for free with Logic. Last time I looked I would need to spend a lot more than the cost of Logic to do this.

^^^ This

[Bob Bickerton]

I think Logic is incredible value really.

There was a time when certain new Logic plugins were paid add-ons. I remember forking out the equivalent of 500 quid for their (then) revolutionary Space Designer plug-in around 2003. All included these days.

Bob

[6120]

Logic Pro for iPad is now subscription based and I read on one of the Mac magazines (maybe Macworld?) that Apple are seeing what pushback they get before they decide whether to go down this route for 11.

[Arpangel]

I’ve been thinking of going from Reaper to Logic for ages, I know it’s not going to run on my old iMac, but I’m wondering if it’ll run on my newer MacBook Air M1 running Big Sur?

[muzines]

The current version of Logic requires Monterey.

You can run older versions on Big Sur, but you won't be able to *buy* Logic on a Big Sur machine, as you can only make AppStore purchases for apps that work on the system you are buying it on (to avoid people buying software that then doesn't run on their machine).

[Arpangel]

The current version of Logic requires Monterey.

You can run older versions on Big Sur, but you won't be able to *buy* Logic on a Big Sur machine, as you can only make AppStore purchases for apps that work on the system you are buying it on (to avoid people buying software that then doesn't run on their machine).

Yeah, I just noticed that, I can’t do it, as my other important progs won’t work on anything later than Big Sur, same old computer issues.
I could trash the whole system and start again, but it’s not worth it.

[sc1460]

I use both Pro Tools Ultimate and Logic; if the artist/producer request pro tools that’s what I’ll use, otherwise I’ll use logic. I don’t see a major difference in workflow productivity/speed between the two, but Logic song starts up way quicker on my Mac; pro tools song load is such a slow startup, always has been.

Ref your question on is Logic more efficient because it’s Apple code, I’ve not done any benchmarking so take this with pinch of salt but I’m def more likely to get a processor overload error with pro tools than with logic;
(I’m typically mixing 32+ tracks with 9-10 heavy-processing plugins per track eg SSLs, Tubetechs, Neves, Manleys, autotune, soothe2 etc)

One last thing- I don’t recall the last time I had to ask for technical help on a Logic forum, but I do on Avid’s forum for pro tools! I guess the Logic developers will know impact of those way too many OS upgrades before the pro tools developers?

Cheers
H

[tea for two]

Not better than a cucumber sandwich on a hot summers day lol.

I still have a soft spot for Sonar 3 by Cakewalk.
Made my first DAW music on it 2003 on windXP.
Still use Sonar latest version on wind11 it's been free for a number of years.
Fully fledged as it were
https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk?lang=en
I read they are going to make it mac ready and will probably price it accordingly.

I should really explore Bitwig on my Surface pro4.
I also have Cubase 11Le.

Logic 8expess, 9express, 10pro been my main daw for
1. Ease of use for me luddite self lol.
2. Bundled sounds : I have made 9 albums using much of the bundled sounds. I could continue making albums using the bundled sounds. Plenty of the bundled sounds hold up to purchase sound libraries.
3. Bundled Amp Cab sims for Bass and Guitar. Decent enuff for me that I don't have any requirement to purchase these from 3rd party.
4. Bundled Plugins including Neve, Pultec, Focusrite, Dbx emulations. So that I don't have want to purchase these.
5. Bundled acoustic drum kits emulation, drum machine emulations, so that I don't have want to purchase 3rd party
6. Bundled sampler.

There are things that are PITA with osx : I can't use my Line6 Kb37 my favourite keyboard audio interface unless I go back to osx10.6 from around 2009.
I can use Kb37 on wind11 fine.
I can't use Dimension pro one of my favourite software instruments unless I use osx10.6. I can use it fine on wind11.

Also I dig touchscreens. It's a whole lotta fun on a 24inch touchscreen noodling aboooot. Got plenty touchscreen options for wind.
For Mac it's just iPad with A12 chip minimum and Logic for iPad.

[Essex Boi]

I said I'd report back after the free trial of Logic. Here is that report. The shortest way to summarise my experience is to say I've paid for Logic.

As expected, it is neither better nor worse than Reaper. System performance (which was my original question) is for all practical purposes the same, though I haven't done any scientific benchmarking.

Logic has some bundled features that I've found useful and a couple of the soft synths are very good. On the other hand, Apple Loops is beyond my comprehension and Drummer is surely a gimmick rather than serious tool.

Familiarity was an initial and inevitable stumbling block. There are some things that were intuitive in Reaper, but required head scratching (and ultimately Google and YouTube) to resolve. The most complicated was a multi-output soft instrument which necessitated dabbling in the Logic Environment to route and map as I wanted.

It's been a fun summer getting familiar with a new DAW. Now I suppose I'll have to get down to writing and recording again. Unless I'm distracted by another new shiny thing . . .

[BigRedX]

Familiarity is always key in switching from any application to one that is supposed to use the same job. In my day job despite the fact that I moved from Quark XPress to Adobe InDesign 15 years ago I still use a custom set of keyboard short cuts that are a mixture of the XPress defaults plus those that I manually created using QuicKeys (to the point that I don't actually know where some of the commands actually are in the InDesign menu system). It's the same with a DAW - I once spent an evening tracking guitars and vocals for the band I was in at the time using Cubase. I suspect that almost 50% of that time taken up with trying to work out how to do things that I knew backwards in Logic rather than actually committing audio to the hard drive.

Apple Loops for me is very useful because it is a quick way of doing stuff that used to take a fair amount of time to create in ReCycle!

Drummer I'm more ambivalent about. In theory it's a neat idea for quickly getting a drum part down for a song, but in practice non of the styles really suit the kinds of music I am currently creating, and last time I looked no-one was creating custom "drummers" for it (I'd be happy to be proved wrong there). However I did come across a tutorial for using drummer to generate random sequences for musical inspiration by replacing the drum kit instrument with a soft synth. I spent a whole evening experimenting, and while I didn't actually use the results on that occasion, I can see myself trying again in the future.

[MOF]

Drummer is surely a gimmick rather than serious tool.

I use it all the time. It’s not going to respond like a real drummer to suggestions but I find that changing drummers, their styles, the length of patterns and then the complexity/loudness parameters gives me a useful starting point.
You then drop the Drummer waveform onto a Midi drum track where you can edit it as you want.
Ticking the ‘follow’ button is another way of giving it suggestions as to how you want it to perform.

[muzines]

The most complicated was a multi-output soft instrument which necessitated dabbling in the Logic Environment to route and map as I wanted.

There should be no reason to do that - you're just likely not familiar with things in this regard.

(This is quite common, some of the fundamentals concepts regarding tracks and track assignments and multi-timbrality and multi-outputs etc are not obvious without reading the manual, or having it explained, or having used Logic for a long time - Apple have worked so that people can use these things without needing to understand these fundamentals (ie, simply selecting a matching option from the new tracks dialog, without understanding what Logic is actually doing), but this can, and does, bite new users a little bit fairly often.)

There's very little in Logic these days for regular use that requires going to the Environment - which is why it's now hidden by Apple by default.

[ajay_m]

It depends to some extent on how well the bundled stuff with Logic works for a user.
Reaper certainly comes with 'just the DAW' and if you are on a constrained budget then there are a bunch of pretty decent free VSTs like Crystal that will give you serviceable synths, also there are some fairly reasonably EPs and so forth (Mr Ray for instance). A good acoustic piano is going to be harder though, because Kontakt has so dominated the sampler market, and NI's Kontakt player doesn't AFAIK let third parties create free sample sets for it, because NI encrypt stuff and you have to have a developer license to create libraries.
This is not true for the full Kontakt sampler of course - but you have to purchase it. And by itself, it's fairly expensive.

There is *this*, though I haven't tried it https://neovst.com/piano-one/

I have acquired some good deals through VSTBuzz, which often have some great bargains, it's worth subscribing to their notifications and keeping a watch out. Also NI have an annual sale where typically you can purchase stuff at half prices. This is how I started, purchasing (I think) Garritan Personal Orchestra which next year made me eligible to purchase (I think) Kontakt at a special upgrade price and from there I upgraded to Komplete 9 and finally Komplete 11 Ultimate, each time forking out a lot less than if I had purchased 'from scratch'.

Unfortunately NI have started removing instruments - Absynth being the most tragic example - and although they can't retrospectively remove my license (I hope), you can't purchase it now and it's not bundled with Komplete any more. There are some other casualties as well I think.

So Reaper plus whatever freebies you can scrounge together and saving for the (unfortunately pretty much world dominating) NI infrastructure are about the only way to go outside of DAWs where you're already happy with what's bundled.

[MarkOne]

Drummer is surely a gimmick rather than serious tool.

I use it all the time. It’s not going to respond like a real drummer to suggestions but I find that changing drummers, their styles, the length of patterns and then the complexity/loudness parameters gives me a useful starting point.
You then drop the Drummer waveform onto a Midi drum track where you can edit it as you want.
Ticking the ‘follow’ button is another way of giving it suggestions as to how you want it to perform.

Yes, indeed. On my last album, I pretty much used it exclusively to get my drum tracks sorted.

Top tips

Choose the drummer model to get roughly the style you want.

Choose one of the 'Plus' drum kits to give you access to multiple outputs for individual mix processing

Use the Arrangement Global Track and use the Logic section names (Choosing Intro, verse, chorus, bridge, outro sections ahead of creating the drummer track goes a long way to altering the feel for each section.)

As MOF says using the follow feature (particularly on a bass line) will help lock the drums to the bass track

Play with the complexity and loudness graph, and also click on things like toms, percussion or cymbals to change a section.

Use the split tool on a section to immediately add a fill where you want one

And then again as MOF said, export the track as MIDI, so you can tweak things further.

The drummer performances can be quite nuanced, there are flams and ghost notes in there you'd never add if you were just programming drums and they do follow their drummer styles closely, and the velocity levels are rendered authentically enough to give a less robotic feel.

Of course, it's not a substitute for the real thing, and if you have access to a drummer and a mic'd kit or e-kit that would obviously be better, but I don't and programming drums on a grid editor is death by a thousand mouse clicks.